Apollo: The Race to the Moon (72 page)

For the many figures in Apollo who were young men when the program finished, the twentieth anniversary finds them still in the middle of their careers. It is bemusing to walk away from a conversation with Glynn Lunney about the dawn of manned space flight and realize that, to his colleagues at Rockwell, Glynn Lunney is—as he was in Chris Kraft’s fledgling flight operations group—a guy on the way up.

Some of the kids of Apollo are running the manned space program. The center director at M.S.C.—now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, J.S.C.—is Aaron Cohen. One of his predecessors was Gerry Griffin. John Aaron runs J.S.C.’s space station planning. Go to the J.S.C. cafeteria and, if you know where to look, you are likely to see Steve Bales, Chuck Deiterich, Bob Holkan, Ed Pavelka, Sy Liebergot, Rod Loe, Jay Greene, Jack Garman, and Emil Schiesser. All still work on the J.S.C. campus, either for NASA or for NASA contractors. Gene Kranz is still at J.S.C., directing the Mission Operations Division. The main difference between Kranz now and the Kranz of twenty years ago is the advent of the automobile tape deck: He can play his Sousa marches on the way to work. He is too senior to be a flight director any more, but if you’re trying to find him when a shuttle is flying, you might want to look first in the MOCR.

Though they don’t work at J.S.C. any more, many others remain in the Houston area—Scott Simpkinson and his co-conspirator in shaving down the Big Joe heat shield, Jack Kinzler, live within a few miles of each other. Gerry Griffin, Jerry Bostick, Dick Koos, Rod Rose, Cliff Charlesworth, John Llewellyn, and Ed Fendell live in and around the Clear Lake housing developments that were so raw and new in 1962 and now are green, shady, and established.

Max Faget and Caldwell Johnson are in Houston, too, past retirement age but hardly retired. They still work together in a private company that Faget founded, Space Industries, Inc., collaborating now into their fifth decade. They have most recently designed a man-tended space station that many NASA engineers will say—off the record—is a masterpiece of economy and elegance, and may yet be the first space station deployed. Johnson still builds model airplanes in his spare time.

In Huntsville, Karl Heimburg, who ran von Braun’s testing lab, is only one of many of the Germans—and now Alabamians—who remain near Marshall in their retirement. Bob Wolf, who waited out the crippled S-II stage on Apollo 6, is still at Marshall. Jerry Thomson heads the Advanced Propulsion Systems Office there. Thomson’s Rocketdyne colleague during the struggle with combustion instability, Paul Castenholz, has retired from the rocket business to live in Colorado Springs.

One prominent Marshall veteran is not in Huntsville. In 1983, the Justice Department, acting on information that had been in the U.S. government’s hands for almost forty years, told Arthur Rudolph, program manager of the Saturn V, that he must surrender his U. S. citizenship and leave the country or face charges that he had been involved in the forced-labor camp at Nordhausen where the V-2 was manufactured. Rudolph, then seventy-six, denied the charges but returned to Germany. His colleagues during Apollo continue to hold him in high esteem, saddened and sometimes angered by this denouement of his career at Marshall.

At the Cape, those who have retired have almost all stayed nearby—Merritt Preston, Tom O’Malley, Ed Fannin, Grady Corn, Sam Beddingfield, Walt Kapryan, and Don Buchanan may be found scattered in Titusville, Melbourne, and Cocoa Beach. Joe Bobik tried to retire, but after the Challenger accident he was lured back to work for Lockheed, overseeing quality assurance for the shuttle’s orbiter. Ike Rigell has been no more successful in pulling himself away from rockets. He is an executive with United States Boosters Inc., with an office a half-dozen miles from Pad 39.

Don Arabian may be found just south of K.S.C., still insisting he has no sentiment about space flight but nonetheless living in Cape Canaveral. Finally free to do everything himself, he lives in a home that looks like a showcase for every kind of craftsmanship, which he built by himself from a concrete shell. Beside the house, a thirty-two-foot oceangoing sailboat is nearing completion, also entirely his own work. Arabian has never sailed, but he intends to take it around the world. Alone, of course. He still has Bill Tindall’s band saw that he borrowed fifteen years ago, but he promises to return it when he is finished. Tindall himself is in Washington, D.C., where he is now as enthusiastic about the mysteries of civilian air traffic control as he used to be about lunar flight.

The X-ray experimenters Izzy Adler and Jack Trombka are also near Washington. Adler continues to teach physics at the University of Maryland and Trombka continues to work at the Goddard Space Flight Center on gamma-ray studies, using high-altitude balloons these days instead of lunar spacecraft. Trombka also teaches an occasional evening course on astrophysics for laymen at the Smithsonian Institution. One evening after class in the fall of 1983, he captivated two of his students with stories about Apollo—about what it was like to be in the Control Center, and especially about the strange and wonderful people who ran the place. Someone, he observed upon parting, really ought to write a book about them.

Images of Apollo

Part of Langley, including one of the wind tunnels, as Owen Maynard saw it when he arrived in April, 1959. (NASA)

The father of every American spacecraft from Mercury through the Shuttle, this is Max Faget holding the blunt-body spacecraft he pioneered. “Max,” Joe Shea observed, “with your personality, every one of your spacecraft designs is going to be blunt.” (NASA)

“Their minds are almost interconnected.” When Faget arrived at Langley in 1945, he found this young man, Caldwell Johnson, who would be his closest collaborator for more than four decades (Courtesy of Kitty Johnson)

A shot of the scandalous performance of M.R.-1. The smoke at the bottom is from the 3-second main-engine burn. At the top of the photograph, the escape tower takes off. (NASA)

The way it all fit together: mobile launcher, umbilical tower, mobile service structure, and a complete Saturn V/Apollo stack.

“He was a noble type of man.” Wernher von Braun stands beside the business end of the first stage of the Saturn V with its five F-1s looming above him. This is one of the few photographs that conveys the size of the machine that von Braun’s vision had wrought. (Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama).

Werhner von Braun and Rocco Petrone at one of the early Saturn launches (S.A.-5) in January 1964. (NASA)

The man who forced all-up on everybody and made it possible to get to the moon before the decade was out. George Mueller watches the Apollo 11 launch. (NASA)

“A voice in the wilderness.” Trying to land the whole spacecraft assembly on the lunar surface would have been like trying to back an Atlas back down on the pad, and no one had figured out how to do that. But there was a strange and probably crazy idea called lunar-orbit rendezvous, promulgated relentlessly by this man, John Houbolt. (NASA)

The consequence of Houbolt’s crazy idea was this unearthly machine, the Lunar Module. This one is Apollo 11’s Eagle, showing Buzz Aldrin with his back to the picture. (NASA)

Everybody said it as if it were his job title: Brilliant Engineer. This is Joe Shea, the ramrod for moving the command module from design to hardware. Few novels have characters as complex and compelling.

“It isn’t that we don’t trust you, Joe, but this time we’ve decided to go over your head.” This is the photograph that the crew of Apollo 1 gave to Joe Shea and that he kept near his front door for years after, not allowing himself to go for even a day without being reminded. (NASA)

The exterior of spacecraft 012 after the fire. (NASA)

Starting with this, Scott Simpkinson was supposed to figure out what had caused the fire. (NASA)

“I’d have followed him right off a cliff.” George Low, the knitter of people who replaced Shea as head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. (NASA)

“He seemed like a bull.” The gentlemanly engineers of Langley needed some help in getting Flight Operations organized, and they got it from Walt Williams, a legend in the flight-test business even before Mercury. (NASA)

“Teacher.” During Mercury and Gemini, Chris Kraft became the embodiment of Flight Operations and the model of flight-controller cool that everyone else tried to emulate. (NASA)

A leading candidate for the most important obscure man in Apollo: Bill Tindall, the ringmaster for the thousand-ring circus called Mission Techniques. This photograph, cropped from a large group shot in the MOCR during Gemini, is the best we could find, but it reveals nothing of his exuberant persona. He is standing above John Hodge, the first flight director after Kraft. (NASA)

“We didn’t need any fancy damn consoles.” This is the MER, a place unknown outside NASA but famous within it, a place for diagnosing and fixing hardware problems a quarter of a million miles away. Its leader, Don Arabian, “Mad Don,” is on the phone. (NASA)

The Mission Operations Control Room, the MOCR, the sanctum sanctorum of Flight Operations. The windows at the right open into the sim room. This particular shot is historic, taken during the Apollo 13 telecast minutes before the explosion occurred. (NASA)

The view from the Trench, showing the back of Jerry Bostick’s head. Note the mechanical calculator beside the console. (NASA)

Green Flight Cliff Charlesworth, the oldest and most normal of the initial three Apollo flight directors who defined the role for their successors. This photo was taken moments after the launch of Apollo 11. The climbing Saturn V is visible on the monitor to the left—a view that none of flight controllers had—but Charlesworth is watching his columns of numbers. (NASA)

White Flight Gene Kranz, “General Savage,” fighter pilot in the 1950s, Kraft’s right-hand man in Mercury and Gemini, Flight for the first lunar descent, Flight when the explosion on Thirteen occurred, director of Flight Operations during the first years of the shuttle, in one of his trademark white vests. (NASA)

Black Flight Glynn Lunney, “the quickest mind in the MOCR,” who directed the transfer into the lunar module after the explosion, making up procedures on the run and getting the job done faster than any team was able to do it in the simulation of similar catastrophes thereafter. He is uncharacteristically somber in this photo taken during Apollo 8. (NASA)

This is John Aaron, EECOM, who made the instantaneous call that saved Apollo 12 from an abort. The more detail you learn about that episode, the more stupefying Aaron’s feat becomes. (NASA)

On the next flight, this EECOM, Sy Liebergot, was at the focal point of the crisis after the explosion, facing the flight controller’s nightmare: trying everything, but finding there was nothing he could do to stop the hemorrhage of cryogenics. (Courtesy of Sy Liebergot)

We can’t be sure, but this photograph was probably taken about an hour into the crisis on Apollo 13, as Don Arabian outlined the minimum voltages for operating the C.S.M. equipment to Gene Kranz. Sam Phillips (seated), head of the entire Apollo Program, watches.

Glynn Lunney during the transfer of the crew into the LEM after the Apollo 13 explosion. Those surrounding Lunney include Chuck Dieterich (behind Lunney), Jerry Bostick (face partially hidden), Bill Tindall (seated), and Chris Kraft (with cigar). (NASA)

Odyssey splashes down safely at the end of Apollo 13. Gerry Griffin, Gene Kranz, and Glynn Lunney lead the cheering. (NASA)

Apollo as History

Writing definitive history is a solemn undertaking and Apollo was not. Our objective has been to tell stories about how an epic triumph was achieved—true stories, but stories rather than analysis.

The reader should be aware that in this process perspective has often been foreshortened. We devote pages to the semi-comic fiasco of M.R.-1 at the Cape and mention great managerial controversies at headquarters in passing. The design and development of the command module are described over several chapters while the design and development of the ingenious lunar module get a few pages. Brainerd Holmes, who made major contributions to Apollo as head of O.M.S.F. from 1961 to 1962, is mentioned briefly; his successor, George Mueller, is the subject of a long discussion. These and many similar discrepancies do not reflect the relative importance of the topics, but the idiosyncrasies of weaving together a narrative.

Much has been omitted altogether. Most conspicuously missing in Apollo, or at least underrepresented, are the astronauts. The astronauts’ story is fascinating and they in fact were much more than pilots, with vital roles in designing the spacecraft and planning the missions. But most of their story has been well and fairly told elsewhere, along with much of the story of the training and support they received from the Flight Crew Operations Division.

The contractors get the shortest shrift. The program’s strategic decisions and flight operations were dominated by people in NASA, but most of the detailed design of the hardware and all of the fabrication of the hardware were done by contractors. One book tells the story of Grumman: Chariots for Apollo: The Making of the Lunar Module, by Charles B. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff (New York: Atheneum, 1985), from which we drew heavily in our own discussion of the lunar module. With that exception, only the official NASA histories give a hint of the challenges that had to be overcome in actually building the Saturn stages, the command and service module, and the ground support facilities at the Cape.

The recovery operations have been ignored. We remember John Stonesifer, who directed the Recovery Systems Branch, wistfully telling us that somehow none of the historians had ever paid any attention to what happened after the spacecraft splashed down. He described for us the complex and delicate task the recovery forces accomplished. And eventually, with apologies, we too left his deserving story on the cutting room floor.

There is a book at least the length of this one to be written about the people of Marshall and the building of the Saturn V, perhaps the greatest technological triumph of the program. The F-l story barely scratches the surface, and the development of the hydrogen-fueled S-II stage, which was as difficult and important, is barely mentioned. We say nothing at all about the extraordinary manufacturing processes that had to be developed to produce the Saturn V.